


Find Your Bones

by spaceleviathan



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Genre: I Don't Even Know, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-05
Updated: 2018-03-05
Packaged: 2019-03-27 13:35:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13881948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaceleviathan/pseuds/spaceleviathan
Summary: They know his name.





	Find Your Bones

The Joker’s eyes watered, irritated by his own gas. Make-up streaked like tragedy down his twisted cheeks. He said, just like he always did, “Arkham's waiting for us, Bats.”

“Only you,” the Batman argued, just like he always did. A role was a role was a role, and they both played their parts.

The Joker licked his tongue over his teeth. “One day you'll join me. There's only so much one lil’ bat can take in this big ol' town.”

“I'll see you then,” the Batman said, for the first time agreeing, to see the Joker’s broad smile. “Goodbye, Ennis.”

The laughter that followed was hitched; uncertainty triggered by a change in the game. The Batman had never agreed with the Joker before, and nor had he successfully gained any real upper-hand. The dark knight could win a fight and loosen teeth, stop a robbery or rescue a potential homicide, but he never had one up on the Joker. So the Joker laughed.

Or, the Batman considered, he might be screaming.

\-------

Gotham was a greedy monster that takes what it wants from those that stay. No matter how much any man loved the city, or the city loved them back, they had to pay the price. It was an indestructible, immovable, terrifying force; something easy to lose yourself to, someplace dark to forget who you are, and to lose track of what Gotham had already stolen.

For some it took money, while for others it took lives. For most, it opened its gaping metal mouth and ate them alive.

\-------

He called himself Jack. He'd flick cards at policemen and blow them up and stuck his tongue out to catch red rain. No one had thought to ask. It had fit the pattern. It was a groan-inducing joke; it _made him laugh_.

But the privilege of a name was dangerous; the only people permitted to refer to him by anything but his self-proclaimed trickster title was himself and dead therapists.

No one really called him Jack at all.

\-------

Call the Batman crazy, but he thought he could see something human in the Joker’s expression.

Gordon seemed to disagree, but _didn't_ call the Batman crazy when he pointed at the flickering corner of the Joker's mouth, or the abnormal darting of his green eyes.

The Joker was being teased by those in the know; even men and women who had only artificial reasons to be angry at him were still angry, and so they mocked him. They might not have bothered if it didn't produce such a reaction. The Batman would have stopped it, but each snarl was a small amount of information they didn’t have before; confirmation of a past that had never been discovered.

The Joker was locked away in the interrogation room, and they were talking to him over the intercom.

_Ennis, we'd like to talk to you. Ennis, we just want to know why you left Wyoming. Ennis, who is Alma? Ennis, if we come in are you going to behave? Ennis, stop that, you'll get blood everywhere-_

Batman made them stop talking by going into the room and letting the Joker laugh at something. A maladjusted mechanism; he hurts, so he laughs. In the end, nothing could hurt him at all.

Words, like a bad joke, were harder to laugh at than slapstick.

And because even the Batman couldn’t bite his tongue against that dark something inside him, he said, “Ennis, stop-” and was rewarded with knuckles across his jaw. The Joker was on him in an instant, and no one else could get in. Batman had blocked the door. Batman knew the maniac better than either of them would have liked. Frustration vented led to a reduced body-count. Anything for lives.

The policemen in the other room found it funny to taunt him, see him bite his tongue and scratch his face and chew on his scars until he was a mess of red and a smear of hate. They would have been killed if they had set foot inside this room. He tore through the Batman now, merciless and crazed, and the Batman found that even his best wasn't enough.

The Joker was not a small man; he was tall and broad and dense with muscles like wires. Sharp and strong and long. He'd cut you in two with the right momentum. He was as practical as he was dangerous, dysfunctional and deadly. And the Batman forgot it whilst the Joker played to lose.

The game was over now. The Joker was pulling himself taunt, right around the Batman's throat.

“ _Ennis_?”

The Joker froze. Of all the times he had been called by his name, he'd only reacted with violence. The Batman could never tell whether it was fury or confusion or both, until now.

“ _Ennis, can y'hear me_?”

The voice was drifting into the room from the speakers, and the Joker, poised to smash his knuckles into the Batman's nose, glanced around to the corners of the room, panicked and clever and desperate to get away.

“ _Look here, Ennis Del Mar, you sit right there at that chair you've gone overturned, and you listen to me right now_.”

The Joker didn’t move, whilst the Batman dared to. When he wrapped his fist around the Joker's hand, the man jerked away; a spark igniting and exploding outwards like a match set to gasoline.

He didn't touch the chair. He stared at the Batman. He looked like he wanted to say something.

The voice was a woman's, heavy with the summer scorch of Wyoming, and she knew the Joker. The Joker’s mental functions worked tentatively at best, but he recognised her too.

“ _Ennis, you need to listen to me carefully,_ ” She said. “ _I didn't want to let the girls anywhere near here, not after what we seen on the news. I didn't realise it was you at first, but I know now. It was Mrs. Havers that saw you, sweetheart, and she come running to me. After tellin' the whole town you gone crazy, of course, and I guess one of them called up the police. Not that we didn't know you were on a dark path anyway, what with that nasty fella-_ ”

Another, male, voice chided her, stopped her mid-rant, called her by name: _Alma._ She took a breath, and said: “ _I was right not to let her in, huh? Ennis, you are acting like- like- well, I ain't rightly sure but I don't like it. I'd think you don't like it either. You're better than this, darling._ ”

The Joker continued to stare at the Batman, statue still and breathing, barely, his chest rising and falling, rising and falling, in infrequent interims. His face was wiped clean, his make-up gone with age and fights and self-harm and tear gas. He licked his lips, an abstract, filthy remnant of a bad diagnosis, and all that was left of his mask was his scars and the poker face he had built. With it, the careful silence that hid his strange drawl; a new twang to replace an old tell.

“ _Ennis,_ ” she said again, and he listened. Propped up on the balls of his feet and the tips of his fingers; crouched and ready to pounce, he listened for a break in her voice or a quiver, and he'd use it.

He stood slowly when she found nothing to say. He faced the one-way glass. He said, as softly as Batman had ever heard him speak, “Alma Beers, there is a word for girls like you.”

The Batman didn't miss her heavy breathing. He didn't overlook how the Joker's sly voice was nothing like the suffocating heat of the empty plains. He’d replaced the open sky with city scrapers, and he chewed his lip and smacked them together and moved his head to and fro, back and forth, like a madman.

She said, in reply, “ _There're words for boys like you too, Ennis_.”

\-------

“Why did you split up with Alma?” Gordon asked, without needing an answer; he knew the answer already. It wasn’t so much a trick question, but just a trick. He wanted to see how much the Joker was willing to say, or, more generously, how he interpreted what Alma had told Gordon. Or, more realistically, how much he knew.

Arkham had poked and prodded, asked every question to be asked about the past the Joker wouldn’t part with, and the Joker’s answers were, predictably, varied and exciting. He had never told the truth, but they weren’t quite lies. They were someone else’s stories.

The Batman, who had been out on the streets trying to catch him, hadn’t had the opportunity to grill the ex. He didn’t know the answer.

The woman in question, the Joker's _ex-wife,_ was a slight and frail looking woman with thin brown hair and big, watery eyes. She wore floral dresses that could have belonged to her mother and she sat with her legs tightly pressed together and her socks pulled to mid-calf. Her hands were clutched knuckle-white on the table top as she looked into the interrogation room.

Batman stood a silent vigil to her right. On her left was her second husband; a man who was certainly not the Joker.

She'd brought along wedding pictures. The Batman didn't know what to make of them anymore than what to make of her.

The Joker wasn't feeling talkative. He was maskless, he was shackled, surrounded by voices and unpleasant memories. He might as well have been in Arkham. He couldn’t escape with Batman right outside the door, so he shut down. He stared at Gordon. He stared at the Batman through the glass. He knew what he was doing.

“Who's Jack, Ennis?”

Alma flinched. The Joker didn't talk.

“Who's Jack, Alma?” The Batman asked. She glared at him, disliking him from the moment he’d stepped in with his cape and cowl, and she sniffed: “Ain't none of your business, sir.”

“Which Ennis?” Joker announced, the crawling phrase an unanswerable question. He asked Gordon again when the commissioner asked once more after Jack: “Which Ennis do you wanna know about?”

“Not Ennis, Mr Del Mar, Jack. Your name is Ennis Del Mar, from Sage in Wyoming. Who is Jack?”

“He's not important,” The Joker dismissed, moving his hands until the cuffs pulled, smiling for the first time. “You're not asking me that question, really, are you, commissioner? No, sir, you are asking _who is Ennis_?”

“You tell me.”

“I would if you’d tell me which one! I ain't some hick from some backwater town, _no_. I am Gotham-born 'n' raised, as if I was Bruce Wayne himself.” His drawl lengthened, mockingly, a broken reflection of a broken woman’s.

“We have evidence to believe this is not true.” Gordon replied, with a slow sigh. “Fine, I’ll play the game. Who is Ennis?”

The clown glanced once to the mirror – this time in Alma's direction – and then back to the Commissioner. “Which,” He said, slowly. “One?”

And the Batman realised what he was asking.

“Check for people named Ennis in the city,” he barked at the policewoman sitting nearby. “Every single person.” To her credit, she didn't complain or ask why, and that saved a life.

\-------

“He scared me, sometimes,” Alma admitted, only when pressed, just over an hour later when their hearts had finally stopped pounding. “We had a big argument about Jack Twist, and I was afraid of him then, but Ennis... Ennis ain't like this. Y'hear stories of men going crazy and hitting their wives 'n' kids, but not like... like _that.”_

“He's manic,” Gordon answered when she looked to him, expecting him to answer when she herself could not. At her blank expression, he continued: “Do you know anything about bipolar disorder? Manic depression? When a person fluctuates between periods of depression and mania?”

Alma nodded then, and the Batman finished: “Mania can lead to delusions of invulnerability and wild behaviour, and in extreme cases it might lead to something like what we've seen from him.” He pointed through to the interrogation room, currently occupied by a delighted, humming clown. Alma shook her head. She still didn't understand.

“He ain't nothin' like the Ennis I knew and married. I mean, I divorced him 'cause of what I learned about him, but he was a quiet man. Prone to a temper, but he had to be pushed. He never got mad at our daughters. I don't think they've ever heard him raise his voice before.”

The Batman was surprised that Gordon hadn't already asked her to elaborate; once again, he was a step ahead, leaving the Batman felt distracted and unbalanced – the ground below his feet constantly shifting. He asked, because he needed to know, “What did you learn about him, Alma?”

“Jack Twist.” She said again, and it sounded like a curse unto the Almighty, the way it made her shiver.

\-------

“Jack Twist?” the Batman asked when Alma had been led aside for a cup of coffee, and Gordon raised a hand.

“I don't know anything for sure. What I'm getting from Alma Kinsey is a lot of anger, and she's been spitting every kind of vitriol which I'm choosing to ignore until we get _him_ talking.” He pointed at the Joker and sighed. “But I don't know how possible it'll be. Apparently, Mr Jack Twist is dead.”

\-------

“Did you kill him?”

“Ennis?” The Joker smiled slowly with all his teeth. “Did you find him?”

“Just in time.” More importantly, “How did you organise it?”

“Do I have you all a'flutter, Bats? That maybe there’s someone on my side in here?”

“You don't have allies here.”

“I guess I'm just a people's person – they listen to me all the same. _You_ like me, don't you, Batman?” He paused, as if expecting a reply. The Batman wasn't about to lend credibility to the question by gracing it with an answer. “Of course not, why would you? We're too different to be friends.” Once again, the Batman kept quiet. Softer, the maniac said: “But you let me go, every time. All the rumours I heard about you just _letting people die_ , but here I am... Or am I the exception from the Second Rule?”

“I have one rule,” The Batman reminded him, and the Joker nodded.

“Sure. Yours means that Gotham is continually exposed to people like me, _over and_ over, and there have always been and will always be people like me, and that’s why people _listen_. I am not an outlier, or an exception; I just put on a little make-up and suddenly you all treat me like a new exhibit at the zoo.

“I guess that must be why you keep on looking through the glass, huh, Bats? Is she still out there? Can she hear us? Because suddenly she comes along, claiming to be from my dark ol' beginnings, and now you're looking at me like I'm a plain ol’ monkey in a cage.

“I'm no _t_ ,” he clarified. “But I'm not alone. You've met Johnny, right? Interesting guy, with his mask and his screaming. Or Pam-a-lam, who would rather see daisies grow from your eyeballs than this city get a single block wider.

“Not that I'm complaining,” he shrugged, caught up in his own words. “They're fun. I like them. What I _don't_ understand is this obsession you all have with finding out who they were.”

“It's for your own good.” The Batman reminded him, and the Joker's laugher was like a wheeze; disbelief and disappointment tucked up in the back of his throat.

“Do you think a past will help me? Maybe find a diagnosis? What about this Ennis? Did he _tell_ you anything interesting?”

“Do you mean the man we found bleeding out with no vocal chords, or the man Alma Kinsey claims you are?”

“Let's talk metaphorically,” the Joker allowed, his next breath a disappointed sigh. “Let's pretend my name is Ennis Del Mar, and out there is a woman who I married at nineteen, and had two _beauti_ ful daughters with. What brought me here?”

“You had an affair.”

The Joker looked up, shifted his bright eyes over to the Batman. “Tell me a _story_ ,” he insisted, and the Batman, for once, to the Joker’s delight, agreed.

He started at the beginning, of what he understood to be a tragedy from the mouth of a bitter bystander. “Ennis Del Mar met a man named Jack Twist, and according to Alma Kinsey they delved into sin together.”

“Jack _Nasty_ ,” the Joker laughed, hysterical, his accent comically thickened.

It was cut off abruptly when the Batman said: “He died.”

“Tire iron.” The Joker nodded, before wincing, shaking his head. “Burst tire. _Gang-_ bang...”

“What happened to him?” The Batman asked, but the Joker shook his head.

“He's not important,” he echoed, moving his hands, listless. “How did that lead Ennis _here_ to dear ol' Gotham City?”

“He went to another big city first, Chicago or New York perhaps. Sometime, either before or during, he had one of his first major manic episodes, and got into some... trouble.” He said graciously, and the Joker's cheeks bulged as he licked the insides of his scars. “He got mixed up in mob business-”

“He was a rancher.” The Joker hastened to remind the Bat, a mediocre storyteller talking to the world’s worst listener. “A gen-u-ine _cowboy_. What’s a boy like him doing in a _mob_ like that?”

“Manic episode,” the Batman answered plainly, the same explanation Gordon had offered Alma. “Mix that with anger or conflicting feelings regarding his lover, his family, his wife... I've seen it drive many people to worse than drugs or gambling or one of a million other reasons why Ennis might end up bleeding in Chicago’s gutters. Afterwards, barely recognisable and – _fractured_ , he heard about a bat in Gotham.” The Batman took a breath. “The end.”

“How...” the Joker replied, nose scrunched as if to say _boring_. _Pedestrian_. _Don't you know me, by now_? “Poetic.”

But he was shaking his head and stretching his mouth and he wasn't entirely smiling.

Batman said again, “Did you kill Jack Twist?”

The Joker launched himself over the table with his teeth bared, as if he'd been waiting for it. The Batman knew him well enough to know the answer.

\-------

Outside, Alma greeted the Batman by stating: “I ain't never heard Ennis talk so much in our entire marriage as he did in that one conversation.”

The Bat only had so much skin showing, but it was black and blue and red from the short but feisty clash of knuckles. Sometimes more words could be said without talking.

\-------

Eventually, even solid leads got tired. Alma was interviewed again and again until she swayed on her feet and on the verge of tears and once they were shed Mr Kinsey came to her defence.

They settled in a nearby hotel, ready to come back and repeat the gruelling procedure when sleep had stopped their crying, and the dawn was painting the sky purple, and the Joker was awake. He smiled at the glass, knowing he was being watched. He hummed pleasantly in the early morning silence.

Shifts changed. The Batman left. The sun rose.

\-------

Ennis Pritchard was dead.

The Batman was back in the police station, the Joker hadn’t left his cell, but he had another murder to his name.

The city was not yet awake, but the police department never slept. There were three people waiting by the desk as the Batman swooped by, and two were women in short skirts and platform heels. Beside them, a dark-haired man sat with his head in his hands. The women yawned, bored, but the man startled as the Batman came and went in a blink of an eye.

Ennis Del Mar, painted with faded streaks of white and red and green, had a lot to say about the murder.

“No, I didn't know him.”

“No, I don't recognise him.”

“Why did the cowboys suffocate?”

“No, I couldn’t tell you his exact address, his schedule, or where to find a spare set of his keys.”

“They didn’t make the town big enough for the two of them.”

The Batman didn't laugh. That had never deterred the Joker before. He enthusiastically greeted the Commissioner who came with the express purpose to interrupt.

“There's someone here to see you, Mr Del Mar.”

The Joker's expression didn't drop, but a new stillness crushed any good humour. Batman felt his own pulse spike, his muscles tense, preparing for a fight.

“Who?” He asked, when the clown didn't.

And, as the Batman had feared, Gordon answered. “Mr Jack Twist.”

\-------

Jack Twist, looking at him for the second time, was a handsome man with bright eyes – blue and chaotic and tired. He looked run down from a tough, Texas life; his deeply tanned hands misshapen and worn. They had the same heavy marks of the ranch that the Batman had never noticed on the Joker's, calloused and hard.

The Batman didn't want to approach him. The man out here was too much and nothing like the man in there.

“You can’t go in there,” Commissioner Gordon insisted, as Jack Twist stepped up close to the glass. “He’s dangerous.”

“Ennis?” Jack Twist laughed, but he’d caught sight of bloody knuckles, black eyes, and hideous scars running up each cheek. “What happened to him?”

Seriously, “He won’t answer our questions.” To lighten the tension, and ease the ugly worry marring the man’s smooth face, Gordon announced, “I don’t think he likes us very much.”

“Ennis don’t like much of anyone,” Jack said quietly, and Batman couldn’t shake the unease from his skin, seeing someone look at the Joker with fondness. “Can I talk to him?”

Jack Twist was required to sit down with the Commissioner, make a statement, and speak in depth about the nature of a long-winded affair that had started even before Ennis Del Mar married Alma Beers. It was several struggles just to get Jack Twist to talk – an internal block meeting several external prejudices; a lifetime of keeping it quiet against a policeman who hated the man Jack Twist loved. Eventually, something resembling and contrasting Alma Kinsey’s story was written down for the record: two kids in love but who couldn’t be together, followed by misunderstandings after misunderstandings, and now they were standing on opposite sides of the glass in a police interrogation room.

The Joker was used to being left for long hours to sweat it out, an old hat at playing and being played by the police force. Usually the calm amid the panic, even he was growing increasingly agitated at the radio silence. The Batman had seen him furious, spitting someone else’s blood, cackling with ecstasy, wheezing with pain, but never like this – a lion trapped in a cage barely large enough to pace, losing itself to animal instinct at the inactivity, tormented by the bustle just out of its reach.

Jack Twist couldn’t stop looking at him. Every time he got up to collect his thoughts, trying to explain the past again and again to people who were barely receptive and yet eager to hear more than he had to offer, he stepped back up to the glass, and every time he wore a new expression. Wonderment, longing, pain, confusion.

“I didn't see him on the news,” Jack told them, shaking his head, fiddling with his fingers until the commissioner offered him a cigarette. “I don’t really get a lot of time to wonder about these big cities. You’re all so far away, and when you’re out on a remote ranch with nothing but cattle, some tractors, and a barely working television, y’all seem like some far off dream. I’ve never been here before, it’s all so cramped and tall, and I wouldn’t have thought that Ennis would be anywhere like this, especially not making the news.”

“Has he ever been violent towards you or others?”

“He’s punched me before, but I was riling him up, I probably deserved it. Otherwise, he’s gentle as apple pie. He talks to horses, he likes dogs, and he’s real calm about everything. I mean I went to the library, I looked up all the stuff you tell me he’s done, and I didn’t – still don’t – quite believe any of it. Ennis ain’t about to gather together a gang and rob a bank, or blow up a hospital! He could barely look _me_ in the eye, and he’s known me since we were teenagers.”

Every account was wrong – what they said about Ennis Del Mar did not match to what they knew of the Joker. Providing a positive ID whilst disproving their own eyes with their stories. Jack talked about burning beans on a mountain side, whilst the Joker clicked his tongue and scraped blood from under his fingernails.

Jack Twist reached out, grabbed the Batman by the edge of his glove, looked up at him with imploring eyes. “Are you going to help him?” And the Batman had been trying, woke up every day wondering if he was doing the right thing, if the people he detained were getting the right help, if they were all trapped in an endless cycle and nothing would ever change.

“I will,” he swore, a promise to no one but himself – he’d make things better, for Alma Kinsey raising children who didn’t know their father, for Jack Twist keeping himself quiet and isolated and sad, for himself so he could sometimes sleep. For the Joker, caught by an illness he could not control.

\-------

When he does speak to the Joker, Jack Twist speaks softly.

The Joker has been put in and wormed his way out of several pairs of handcuffs – and had left the most recent pair lying on the table whilst he sat under the mirror. They can see the top of his head, a curl of green hair, can hear him humming under breath, and Jack Twist pulls a chair over, and puts his head on the glass.

“Can you hear me?” he asked, and waited for a long while – longer than the patience of the police, than the commissioner, and even longer than the Batman. He waited for the Joker to stop, to quieten, to be still – and eventually he did, head tilted and ears cocked, in the unusual position of wanting to hear something that someone else had to say.

“Lureen, she told you some evil things, Ennis,” Jack said, slowly, gently, like talking to a spooked animal. “She thought she was protectin' me, I guess, or Bobby, or herself. It ain't right, Ennis, and I didn't know a thing 'bout it. I sent you some postcards, but I imagine by then you'd moved on, and I was so _angry_ at you...”

He fell quiet for a moment, and the Joker didn’t move. The Batman could see his face on the cameras, stony and frozen; the Joker at his most calculating. He was waiting for something, whether it was a sign or a word or an explosion. It set the Batman’s teeth on edge.

“I’m sorry, Ennis, I’m so sorry,” Jack began again, pressing himself up to the glass, and it was inconceivable to the Batman that anyone would ever want to be so close to a monster. But Jack Twist knew the Joker long before the makeup, the murders, even before he’d come to Gotham. The first crime they’d ever committed was falling in love.

Then Jack started talking. “Do you remember that goddamn mountain? And those sheep that kept on getting lost? I thought Mr Aguirre was going to kill us, like that was the biggest thing I ever had to worry about. I didn’t want to fail at that job, because that’d just be yet another thing my da was right about. I wasn’t good for nothing, but you were a natural. You would be, your pa’s ranch was bigger than ours. Not that that means your da was better than mine, I know what you told me, I know, I remember. Just about haunted every dream I had when we were apart. Just kept on thinking, _thank the Lord that man can’t touch Ennis now_.”

He stopped. Took a long breath. Settled deeper into his seat. He glanced around for a second, realising for the first time just how closely everyone was listening, analysing every word for anything they could learn about the Joker’s past to use it against him in the future.

Started again, more haltingly, taking a while to collect himself, “Remember how mad you were when I asked you to come with me? I knew it wouldn’t amount to anything, but I wanted you close to me. I wanted to protect you from everything that made you scared.

“But look at you now, in the big city! Lord, Ennis, I never thought anyone would get your ass outta Wyoming for more than a weekend. Even your girls couldn’t convince you. You said the city was dangerous-“ And finally, a reaction. Jack stopped to hear the small huff of breath, a tiny scoff of laughter. The Batman saw the stretch of his lips on the monitors rather than heard it, and the sight made him wary. Jack Twist, however, took it as a good sign.

“Guess you weren’t wrong, huh? Never thought it’d be you causing all the trouble.”

“ _Me_?” The Joker interrupted in his usual trill that made Jack jump. “What have I done? _I’ve_ barely blown up a couple of city blocks. Look for the bat in the commissioner’s belfry; now _there’s_ a guy who knows how to make some trouble.”

And Jack Twist did look at the Batman, long and hard and, for a moment, furious. The Joker started laughing, haltingly, _staccato_. Jack asks, without breaking eye contact with Gotham’s dark knight, “Has he hurt you, Ennis?”

The Joker’s merriment erupted out of his body all at once, a howl of unrestrained glee, and it was enough of an answer for Jack Twist. He turned around, his back to the Batman, just to watch Ennis Del Mar laugh. Like a wonder. Like he’d never seen it before.

\-------

Jack shot up as fast as a bullet from a gun when Alma Kinsey burst in. He stared at her wildly, hat clutched in a white-knuckled grip.

Alma looked as exhausted as Jack, crumpled and strained; sleepless. But where Jack was scared, Alma was incensed.

“Jack Twist!” She snapped. Jack, not to be accused of anything he wasn’t, bravely stood his ground, even when Alma pointed her shaking finger in his face. “You got a lot to answer for, you foul, slimy devil of a man! Look at what you’ve done to him! To Ennis!”

“I didn’t-“ Jack started, voice small like a mouse, but Alma wasn’t going to hear whatever defence he was trying to build.

“You ruined everything! You corrupted him! He went up on that damned mountain and you took him away from me!”

“He ain’t a thing to own!” Jack snapped in reply, batting Alma’s hand away from his face. “He made his own damn choices.”

“You should never have touched him. He was a good man!”

“Alma-” Jack said.

“Don’t you dare!” She cried out. “You stole him, and he let you! Let you drag him away from his family, his daughters! I can’t even bring them in here, how do you think they’ll feel, seeing their daddy like- like-“ she gestured wildly at the window separating them from the twisted clown on the other side. She stopped. She heaved a breath. “You disgust me.”

There was dead silence in the room when Gordon arrived and shut the door, closing out the curious eyes that were straining to glimpse the unfolding scene. He had a coffee in each hand, and one resting in the crook of his elbow.

“Perhaps we all need a time out,” Gordon said, gesturing at the table, “Seeing as we can’t talk like adults.”

“I’ve already told you what this man did, sir,” Alma said smartly, keeping her eyes on Jack as they were herded to the other side of the room.

“I’m not about to apologise for something that happened fifteen years ago-“

So Gordon became a mediator, “I don’t blame you for being angry, Mrs Kinsey. Nor you, Mr Twist, so please, sit down.”

It was with great reluctance and a long period of awkwardness before anything started to settle. Jack was unhappy about being turned away from the window, and kept on sneaking looks over his shoulder, as if to check that Ennis was really here and hadn’t disappeared again, even if it wasn’t quite the happy reunion he’d anticipated. Alma, seated opposite Jack, kept her eyes away from the interrogation room, discomforted by what Ennis had become, but equally unwilling to give any grounds she had gained on Jack Twist.

Gordon, between them, was content – this could have been a quiet moment with a victim, or the satisfactory build of anticipation for the beginning of an interrogation. He sipped his coffee, where his guests only either played with their cups or warmed their hands, and relaxed in the silence.

The Batman, sequestered in the corner, keeping his sharp eyes trained on the Joker first and the visitors second, remained unobtrusively in the shadows. He felt like a fly on a wall for how quickly he was forgotten in the collapsing circus ring that had enveloped their lives.

“The way I see it, and stop me if you need to,” Gordon started, only when his coffee was drained. He leaned forward, close to them both, smiling tightly. “But Ennis Del Mar is gone. And that’s cruel of me to say, and I know it hurts. I’m sorry,” he looked at them both, seriously, for a long time. “I’m very sorry. But, for a moment, let’s do as he does,” he gestured to the window, where the Joker was sitting at the far side of his table, as if to occupy the empty space at theirs. “I’d like to tell you about my dreams.”

Gordon ignored the exasperation from Alma, and the confusion and increasing agitation from Jack. He lit a cigarette, leaned back in his chair, and savoured whatever images were dancing in his head. In the background, still keeping guard but ears alert to the story, the Batman was seeking the direction the commissioner was leading the conversation.

“I wake up one morning, and it’s just like any other day. My phone’s ringing, I’m needed at the office, and something has gone wrong. It’s him,” he points. The Joker, unassuming, begins to whistle a jaunty tune. “Arkham have discharged him. Turns out, he was faking the whole time. He’s smoke and mirrors, a simple crook in a complex town, and I can send his ass to Blackgate. There, they stick him in confinement so he can’t talk to anyone, can’t manipulate anyone, and can’t escape. Instead of therapy, he’s starts facing genuine consequences for his actions, and doing something to pay back the damage he’s caused; even if the only payback he can give is never being seen again.”

Even the Batman struggles to listen to Gordon, even though something very simple and very black-and-white in his heart agrees with the sentiment. But overwhelmingly, and conquering Jim too, the truth stands out, bitter and twisted, and makes even the most understandable ideas seem evil.

Gordon, tapping the excess off the tip of his cigarette, breathes a heavy, weary sigh. “Then I wake up. Truly, I’d love to find out one day that your man in there is competent enough to stand trial and go to prison, but the more we learn about him, the more tests we run, the more we realise he hasn’t got the capacity.”

“He’s not stupid,” Jack started to argue, angry, defensive, upset.

Gordon stopped him quickly. “I know. I’ve tried to match wits with him before, and it’s not worth the effort. That doesn’t undermine the significant cognitive impairment that has permanently altered many integral aspects of Ennis Del Mar.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Jack said, at the same time as Alma shaking her head adamantly, in abject denial.

Gordon, with all the knowledge of a layman who was getting far too familiar with frequent visits from mental health professionals, elaborated: “For example, his retention – how long he remembers things for – is negligible, and the further back he tries to remember the worse his memory is. His illness itself, not quite diagnosed but rather an amalgamation of multiple disorders, means that he is arguably out of control of his actions.”

“Arguably?” Alma asked. “You think he might know what he’s doing?”

“I think he does,” Gordon answered with his reliable brand of hard-hitting honestly. “But I also know there’s only so much you can fake.”

The Batman watches as the Joker’s whistling dies. He lowers his eyes to the table and falls silent and still. In the silence, the Batman almost thinks he can hear their hearts beat. It heralds in a sense of panic that the Batman forces himself to quash, empathising with the rapid rabbit race of unstoppable thoughts that are hidden by the deceptive stillness.

He stood up straighter, stepped closer to the door. He diverted Gordon’s audience, so far so captive, but Gordon was a master at distraction tactics.

“Now I have a situation and there are four solutions. You won’t like two of them,” he told them, glancing pointedly to the Batman. “One is standing outside in a white coat, and two… well, he’s not the biggest talker. So far, they’ve been our only options, aside for option five,” and here he pointed at himself. “I’ve already told you about my dream.”

He waits for them to catch up to him, to ask the questions and bring the answers upon themselves. They do, eventually, tentatively, both petrified and exhausted. Gordon rounds on Alma first.

“Option three requires a breakthrough. Someone says something to him, and something gets through to him. What can you tell me about him?”

“I-“ she said, harried, catching Jack’s eye then glancing away furiously. “I don’t know! He liked fishing, or so he told me, but I guess he didn’t get much of that done after all.”

“We fished,” Jack defended, huffing. Added, quieter, “Sometimes.”

“Jack?” Gordon asked, to the same startled response of someone put on the spot and asked to fix an unfixable problem.

“He spoke a lot about his girls, Junior and Jenny. He was really proud of them, but so scared they’d find out about who he was and what he’d done – what we’d done – and that they’d hate him for it.”

“They don’t hate him,” Alma muttered, rolling her eyes, but clutching her dress tighter in regret. “Then again, I never told them all that much.”

“Option four,” Gordon offered, almost blasé, cutting all arguments short. “We could try a little bit of cooperation. Together, we might be able to work out a solution.”

Even the Batman glanced over to gauge their reactions – neither of them seemed thrilled at the prospect, each eying the other with suspicion and guilt. Jack sunk deeper into his slouch, whilst Alma sat up straighter. A moment later she said, “He loved the horses.”

“And he hated beans,” Jack remembered. “That was my fault.”

“The girls hate them too. Learned it from him. Don’t think they ever really tried them. I didn’t eat beans again ‘til I met Lloyd.” She huffed, a small sign of laughter that Jack returned with a small, painful smile. It left behind a thick tension, during which Gordon relit his dying cigarette and continued on as unconcerned as he’d ever made himself out to be.

Jack was the first one to crack; he told her, “I’m not here to argue with you, Alma.” His energy had abandoned him, and he was empty of fight. Alma just looked tired. “I just want to help him. Please, he needs us.”

Alma, proud and hurt, was clearly struggling. Jack, who had less to lose, saw her decision long before the Batman. He crossed his arms over his chest, and turned his chair back towards the window.

“Option three, then,” Gordon announced, and managed to convey his deep disappointment in both of them.

It felt like the wrong decision, but the atmosphere was toxic, and it seemed that it had killed all reason. Now, the only way to stop them glaring at each other was to give them something to hate – the Batman felt their eyes follow him, alarmed, as he headed towards the interrogation room.

“Oh, hello,” The Joker greeted pleasantly, and his eyes were just as bloodshot, black and tense as his two guests outside. He tutted, a mockery of someone’s normalcy, “Those two, always at each other’s throats.”

“This is the first time they’ve properly met.”

“No,” The Joker said, closing his eyes and turning his head towards the one-way glass. “We’ve had this argument before.” He was silent, as if to listen, but there was nothing to listen to. The Batman sat back in the chair, and waited.

The Batman asked his question, when even the silence ran out and the Joker’s smile started to quiver at the corners of his mouth. It had been poisoning his mind for hours, “Why did the cowboys suffocate?”

The Joker had been expecting this, so often they found themselves meeting on the same train of thought. “Because they crushed each other’s lungs.”

“Why would they do that?”

The Joker’s eyes moved, away from him then back again. He leaned forward, almost reached across the table.

“What do _you_ do when you’re in love?”

\-------

There were only so many minutes in the world, and Bruce Wayne spent at least half of them thinking about how few he’d had with his parents. He was surrounded by the city they built, lived the life they had made for him, and hoped he had made them proud by walking a path they would never have expected.

The Batman hadn’t thought too much about the Joker’s parents, and what they would have looked like; the few times he had, he’d imagined some maniac locking people in the basements of detonating buildings, and once he’d pictured a strangely serene family destroyed by an encroaching madness too overwhelming to contain.

It was nothing more than a profiling exercise, a mental marble for the Batman to play with during his downtime; with the Joker’s pick-and-choose attitude towards what he remembered of the past, it would never be answered. Even now, with a name to put to a face, no one could tell anyone much about the childhood Ennis Del Mar had. There were brothers, Jack and Alma had told them at different times, but neither had met them, nor even remembered their names.

Jack knew a couple of horror stories about Ennis’ dad, enough to make even the Batman shiver, and whilst he might not have incinerated anyone under a collapsing building, what had happened wasn’t better. Enough to traumatise a child forever, or kick-start a psychosis.

The Batman had never considered the other side: progeny. Bruce Wayne had never thought about the next generation, or even dared to think what he’d do when he was too old to continue his work. And if he wasn’t capable of considering his own future, he certainly had never thought about the Joker’s posterity.

Yet here she stood, defiant and clutching her purse between her and the truth, but her feet were spread solidly, and it would take an immeasurable force to move her now that she had decided to stay.

“Junior!” Alma gasped, rushing to her daughter’s side, “No, darling, you can’t be here. You gotta go home, what are you even doing here, how-“

“Ma,” Alma Del Mar said, quiet but stern, and covered her mother’s hand. “I have to see him.”

“What about Jenny? Where’s Jenny?”

“I wouldn’t let her come, so she said I’d have to shout at him for both of us.”

Gordon looked unsurprised, confirming the Batman’s suspicions. He said, “Do you want to talk to your father, Miss Del Mar?”

Despite her strong tone, Junior had to give herself a minute to collect herself. And she hadn’t even seen him yet. The Batman held his breath, waiting for the young woman’s almost confident nod, and the signal to open communications between the Joker and Ennis Del Mar’s family.

“Hi, daddy,” she whispered, and it was hard to hear her over the crackling intercom. She didn’t immediately repeat herself, taking her time to observe his face, his clothes, his posture, his hair. When she caught sight of the Batman, shifting in the corner of her eye, she blinked for what seemed like the first time.

“It’s me, it’s Junior,” her voice was louder now, and she was beginning to smile. Relieved to see that he was alive, just grateful to have the chance to talk to him again. “I’ve missed you so much. Jenny wants me to yell your ear off, you scared her half to death, but I’m done being mad. I just want to talk to you, like old times.”

The Joker had yet to look up. He was playing with his handcuffs, running his palms along the blunt edge, pressing the tips of his fingers into the chains.

“Do you remember when you took me out on the horses? You mostly listened to me, Jenny always tells me I need to talk less, she’s just like you can barely get a word out of her, never could with you either-“ she stopped, and he bit at his filthy nails. She faltered, and pressed the button on and off, just to make sure it was working. Then she stepped back, as Alma took her place.

“Ennis, Junior is trying to talk to you!” she snarled, and the Joker’s face snapped towards the one-way glass, eyes black and venomous. In the blink of an eye he was suddenly right there, slamming his palm into the mirror. Alma Junior screamed.

The Batman moved in front of the mirror, hiding the Joker’s grinning face, but he couldn’t cover the incessant banging on the window, nor the steady incline of disgusting laughter.

“Alright,” Gordon said, his hands on Junior’s shoulder, whose face began to twist. What had been brave and hopeful had been so quickly destroyed, and she turned into her mother’s arms. “I’ll get us all something to drink if you’ll step outside with me, and we can talk about what just happened-“

But Jack Twist was shaking his head, hands balled into fists, a moment away from bursting into the interrogation room and fighting the Joker himself. “That ain’t Ennis,” he spat boldly, teeth grinding together. “That ain’t Ennis. What the _FUCK_ has he done with Ennis?”

“Mr Twist,” Commissioner Gordon tried to soothe him, voice calm and steady, but Jack had stopped listening, staring at the curled up figure of Alma Junior.

“That _ain’t_ Ennis Del Mar.”

“You have already identified him-“

“Well, I was wrong. I don’t know who the hell is in that room, I don’t know why he looks so much like Ennis, but that _ain’t him_.”

“Mrs Kinsey,” Gordon asked, looking for backup, but her face had been bleached of colour, her expression agape with horror.

“What-” she began, eyes unfocused, the start of a question without directionality. “Where’s Ennis? If it’s not him then- where’s Ennis? Where’s _Ennis?_ ” Wrapped in her arms, head digging into her mother’s shoulder, Junior started to sob.

The Batman couldn’t watch a girl learning, perhaps for the first time, how far away from her father she was. He remembered a dark night, a rainy alleyway, and the feeling that his parents were just out of reach. He turned away and came face to face with a bloody smile; a man who knew exactly what he was doing.

\-------

The questions changed after that.

“Do you remember meeting Ennis Del Mar?”

“Where is Ennis Del Mar now?”

“What did you do to Ennis Del Mar?”

But the Joker wouldn’t talk. He just laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

\-------

They had been left behind, as they always were.

Alma Junior was taken out of the station by her step-father, Gordon had gotten lost in his evidence, and the Batman was entertaining the resident freak show. Cradling cold coffee, Jack and Alma were abandoned, forgotten about, allowed to watch as the Batman and the Joker circled each other, the new mystery acting as an electrical surge in a dimming relationship.

“I spent a long time hating you,” Alma told the table rather than Jack, but she was a straight-forward woman, tired and sad, and she’d had more than enough of tiptoeing around men.

“I thought if I hated you enough, Ennis would too. That he’d feel some of it, and stop loving you the way he did. But, he couldn’t, he just-“ she stopped, clenched her fists together, took a deep sharp breath, tried to hold herself together. But the more she spoke, the more her voice shook. “He just drifted away from me, so I started hating him too. And now he feels further away than he’s ever been. That horrible monster probably killed him, and I spent so many years angry and hurting, and I’m never going to see him again to tell him how much I loved him, and how much I just wanted him to come back home.”

She couldn’t shake the thought that things might have been better if Ennis had left with Jack all those years ago, but then thought of tire irons and blood. Thought Ennis must have always been doomed. 

She avoided meeting Jack’s eyes so he wouldn’t see how the tears had collected in her eyes, but for her pride she sacrificed witnessing the beginning of Jack’s break, the streaks running down his face as his hand tentatively touched hers. 

“I know,” he said, in a voice barely louder than a whisper. “I miss him so much. I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

Alma hesitated, squinting down the man she had spent years blaming for ruining her life. In her head, she had built him up as some sinful, terrible beast, but the truth was vulnerable and frightened and small. She gripped his hand, tight and reluctantly forgiving, and struggled to maintain her composure even as some longstanding sickness finally untangled in her stomach. 

“He’s out there somewhere,” she promised. “We’ll find him."

She'd leave him outside the police-station, watch him in the rear-view mirror as he faded from one to one in a million amid the Gotham city streets. Knew, that like Ennis, she'd never see Jack Twist again. 

She prayed, _bring Ennis home_ , as she’d always prayed. Added, _save Jack from being led astray_.

_It wasn’t him_ , she’d tell her daughters. _We’ll find him_. Just like she told Jack.

She knew where he was, just like she knew he was gone.

Jack had been so sure, _that’s not Ennis_ , and Alma still felt the ice-cold shiver of realisation crawl over her skin. She knew, Ennis had never stepped foot in that city. She knew, Ennis had died years ago. She knew, Ennis would never forget his children, his lovers, his family.

She wonder what else he'd seen through that thin sheet of glass, staring at a man with two scars and Ennis’ eyes.

But Jack had been  _sure_. 

Maybe they’d see each other again, running in boundless circles in those endless, busy streets; because Gotham always took something, and she had watched the monstrous city swallow them whole.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This has ... been a long time coming.
> 
> Find me on: [Blog](http://www.space-leviathan.tumblr.com), [writing blog](http://www.spaceleviathan.tumblr.com), and [Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/spaceleviathan) (tweet tweet o n the street)


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